Poe's Appearance in Baltimore

Jeffrey A. Savoye in his essay, "Two Biographical Digressions: Poe's Wandering Trunk and Dr. Carter's Mysterious Sword Cane" notes that there were two first-hand witnesses that saw Edgar Allan Poe, before he was medically treated and died. They described his appearance when they saw him on a Baltimore street.

Although neither man “was scrupulous in his recollection,” their testimonies record Poe’s appearance.

Snodgrass says:

His face was haggard, not to say bloated, and unwashed, his hair unkempt, and his whole physique repulsive. His expansive forehead, with its wonderful breadth between the points where the phrenologists locate the organ of ideality—the widest I ever measured—and that full-orbed and mellow, yet soulful eye, for which he was so noticeable when himself, now lusterless and vacant, as shortly I could see, were shaded from view by a rusty, almost brimless, tattered and ribbon-less palmleaf hat. His clothing consisted of a sack-coat of thin and sleezy [sic]black alpaca, ripped more or less at several of its seams, and faded and soiled, and pants of a steel-mixed pattern of cassinette, half-worn and badly-fitting, if they could be said to fit at all. He wore neither vest nor neck-cloth, while the bosom of his shirt was both crumpled and badly soled. On his feet were boots of coarse material, and giving no sign of having been blacked for a long time, if at all.

Moran gives a shorter but equally detailed account:

A stained faded, old bombazine coat, pantaloons of a similar character, a pair of worn-out shoes run down at the heels, and an old straw hat.

Haggard, bloated, unwashed, tattered says the first account.

Stained, faded, worn-out, run down says the second.

Look around. See the face of mental illness. More Poes are out there.

Poe's Word-Agony

Edgar Allan Poe died under mysterious conditions with days of “irregular” eating and sleeping patterns before his death. “No one seriously questioned the verdict that the culprit was liquor…science in that day being unable to define it further,” says John Walsh in his book, Midnight Dreary.

Poe himself writes in his letters:

But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long periods of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God knows how much or how long. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.

In a PBS interview, Dr. Kay Jamison confirms that the “killing sides of manic-depressive illness” are “alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.” She cites her and her colleague’s review of twenty studies of rates of alcohol abuse or alcoholism in patients with manic-depressive illness:

Well, if you ask writers and artists who have depression, severe depression or manic depression, what they feel is important to them about their illness and their moods in their work, what they almost always focus upon is the intensity and the range of emotional expressiveness. Learning from the pain and from the suffering, they experience the sorrow, they experience the despair of the nihilism and so forth. And on the other hand, very ecstatic and visionary states. So that's what artists and writers focus upon.

Creative individuals pour out their best rhetoric from their guts' overflow of pain. Word-agony. And it sears into our beings, cutting us with their suffering, because we've felt it too.

Readers and writers touch. And their touch is music.

Voice of the Shuttle: "Premier Online Destination"

Voice of the Shuttle is a "premier online destination" for surfers of the web and die-hard researchers, according to Forbes. It lists VOS in its "Summer 2002 Best of the Web" directory in the category for academic research.

VOS is a database and social bookmarking site that was started by a UC Santa Barbara professor, Allan Liu, in spring 1994.

Liu structured VOS’ mission to provide an annotated guide to online resources for the humanities, sciences, social sciences and new digital media. Its audience includes researchers, students and instructors from elementary through higher education.

The site offers more than 25 categories of research links for the humanities and social sciences: art, anthropology, architecture, classics, cyberculture, dance, history, law, literature, music, politics, postindustrial business theory, religion, science, and technology of writing. Resources include: museums, journals, publishers, listservs, conferences, and travel.

What does the allusion, VOS, mean? It refers to the Greek myth of a young girl, Philomela. Raped by her brother-in-law, who cuts off her tongue and imprisons her, she weaves a tapestry that communicates, instead of her voice. Likewise, VOS communicates by its cross weave of hyperlinks that are designed to form a tapestry of commentaries.

Grace Sparks Comments

Blogger Mark Thwaite should be impressed by the number of comments he received in three days to his post for help on ReadySteadyBlog.

His post on 24 April 2007 reads:

A favour: do any readers know of a good theological/philosophical book on the (Christian) concept of grace? Any tip-offs? Thanks so much!

Thwaite received 12 comments in three days.
Grace seems to be a hot topic.

I posted my response yesterday:

I recommend Stepping Out of Denial into God's Grace Participant's Guide #1 by John Baker and Rick Warren. Warren, as you might know, wrote the mega blockbuster, The Purpose Driven Life.

The Barnes and Nobles’ site includes this quote about The Purpose Driven Life:

With over 10 million copies sold since its release in October, 2002, the book received the ECPA 2003 Book of the Year Award.

Research Moves Toward Electronic Annotated Bibliography

Comparing electronic annotated bibliography to the traditional style is like comparing an electric typewriter to a word processor—once one uses a word processor, there’s no going back to an electric typewriter. Similarly, once a person has used electronic annotated bibliography, no looking back to the old ways.

An example of an electronic annotated bibliography is called Zotero, a free service. While researching Poe, I use it to collect, manage, and cite my research sources.

With clicks from my mouse and by installing Zotero in my web browser, I save time. As an English researcher, my Works Cited page is formatted easily.

Another example is Diigo, which is my favorite and preferred method to store my notes and sources for research. Why would someone use an old-fashioned method of index cards or copy/pasting with a word processor articles and type notes, when all this can be done through Diigo. It’s also free, and I highly recommend it.

PSYART: Psychoanalytic Studies of the Arts

Created in 1997, PSYART is an online, peer-reviewed social bookmark that specializes in the psychoanalytic study of literature and any other art. The archived journal is available free.

Publication in PSYART means that each article is, in principle, available to any of the 50,000,000 people estimated to use the Internet.

Recent editions include: "Kubla Khan": Genesis of An Archetype; Literary Parallels Stemming from a resemblance in the Authors’ Creative Development: The Extraordinary Similarities between Amos Oz’s The Same Sea and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake; and Suicidal Risk in Lives of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia PlathThe journal hopes to cast its “net as widely as possible in the psychological study of the arts.”

Archived variety includes: an analysis of literary imagery in Freud's dreams; a study of sexualized relationships in the filming of Lolita; an amusing gibe at Lacan; an experimental study of the pronunciation of "picture poems" (complete with sound spectrograms).

Each article is represented by only two things: an author's abstract of 150 words and a hyperlink to the article itself. Click on one of these hyperlinks and you will be connected to a site where PSYART maintains the article you seek.

All abstracts can be searched for topics by the "Find" command in such browsers as Netscape, or Explorer. Because PSYART is a hyperlink journal, containing only abstracts, as many as 500 articles can be current in the site at one time.

The goals of the journal are to become a large repository for current work in this field and to circulate ideas rapidly.

It’s also interactive. A reader can discuss an essay with its author through the author's e-mail address included with the abstract. Or a reader can discuss the article with some eight hundred people in the field through their forum, provided the reader is subscribed, which is a simple process.

PSYART is indexed in both the MLA Bibliography and PSYCINFO. Articles are accessible through Google, AltaVista, Northern Light, and other Internet search engines. That means that literally millions of people could read your article.

The journal accepts articles that have already appeared in print (subject to review by the editors and to the permission of the previous publisher). Similarly, it has no objection to articles that appear on its site being published elsewhere.

The Black City: A Fantasy Writer's Blog

Fantasy author John Marco announces in his blog post today that he’s done—with his latest book, Army of the Fantastic. He’s offering a book giveaway contest. How cool is that!

Marco’s blog gives fantasy writers like me an idea of a writer’s life and the writing process. 899 pages. That’s how long his latest book is. And he’s already “brainstorming” on his next book—character sketches, doodling out maps, and outlining the whole plot.

However, he’s taking a lunch break to eat and watch a DVD, The Iron Giant.

After reading his blog, I’m motivated to produce more pages of my own writing. Keep blogging, Marco. I need the push.

Dana Press Blog: Vonneguit, Creativity and Depression

Edgar Allan Poe’s melancholic colors are seen in many other writers. An example is Kurt Vonnegut Jr., writer of Slaughterhouse-Five, who died on April 11, 2007.

On the Dana Press Blog, Nicky Penttila posts an interview with Nancy C. Andreasen, a long-time friend of Vonnegut. “He matched the pattern of having significant mood disorder,” said Andreasen, a neuroscientist.

Vonnegut suffered with depression throughout his life and attempted suicide in 1984. “I would say the general pattern, for him and for most creative people, is they are not very productive when they’re depressed,” said Andreasen. “They do most of their creating after they’ve emerged from feeling depressed.”

Poe described his wrestling with depression in his letters. Similarly, Vonnegut expressed his melancholy in his writing. “But, in a sense, he overcame the sadness, to write,” Andreasen said.

By writing about the ebbs and flows of depression and mania, writers increase knowledge to recognize these forces in us or others. Awareness is part of the cure.

Furious Seasons Blog: New Study on Bipolars Suggests Low Efficacy of Meds

As blogger Philip Dawdy notes in his post on Furious Seasons Blog, the media blinked. Again.

However, bloggers took notice of a 26-week study by The New England Journal of Medicine, published 26 April 2007. The findings confirm what bipolars blog about—the hit and miss effectiveness of medications.

The NEJM study encompassed 179 bipolar patients. Both groups took mood stabilizers. 27% of bipolar patients averted depression for 8 weeks by taking placebos, compared to 23.5% that took anti-depressants.

The poor media coverage of this landmark study underscores the importance of web social networks. As a society, we cannot depend on the media. It took notice, front-page, when mental illness ran amok recently, murdering and maiming. A media frenzy covered the Virginia Tech shootings.

However, Cho Seung-Hui was a victim, as well as those he hurt. He entered a mental facility on a mandatory seven-day hold, because he was in danger to himself and others. The health and school communities failed to take notice. And his neighbors failed to notice as well.

We as a community of human beings have a stake in treating the mentally ill and informing each other regarding scientific knowledge. If we do not collectively help those that have periods where they’re not in control of themselves, we must shoulder the burdens of their railings of madness.

Writers Write Blog's Interview with Martha Wells

Courage and passion are as important to a writing career as the sun is to living. These virtues shine through Martha Wells’ interview on Writers Write Blog.

Working as a fantasy writer, Wells enthuses, “I just like that feeling of a window onto another time and place. It's similar to what I like best about SF [science-fiction] and fantasy, the feeling of being able to experience whole different worlds.”

With a degree in anthropology, Wells has always liked folklore and mythology.” She creates the culture of her world-building from “elements of real cultures around the world.”

Wells full-time plunge into a writing career began a few years ago. She worked in computer support and as a programmer and web designer. However, she wanted to be a writer from an early age. Steven Gould’s writer’s workshop during college stimulated her serious thinking about writing as a career.

Major influences in Wells’ writing are Sherlock Holmes, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, and Andre Norton. “She [Norton] wrote both fantasy and science fiction, and she was the first, or one of the first, writers to use a lot of the concepts that are fairly standard in fantasy and SF today. I think she was very ahead of her time.”

Wells mentions these books during her interview:

“The Children of Green Knowe" books by L.M. Boston

"Jumper" by Steven Gould

The Three Musketeers and the other Dumas books

Books by Jules Verne

"The Bridge of Birds" by Barry Hughart

"Imaro" by Charles Saunders

"The Patient's Eyes" by David Pirie is a recent favorite

The Element of Fire is Wells’ latest book. Visit her website here.

An Unquiet Mind

Poe’s well-known, harsh personality is typical of those who navigate the treacherous waters of the bipolar temperament. In her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, Dr. Kay Jamison describes the antagonistic temperament:

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable. Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its misbehavior, and, especially, through its savage moods. The sadder, sleepier, slower, and less volatile depressions are more intuitively understood and more easily taken in stride. A quiet melancholy is neither threatening nor beyond ordinary comprehension; an angry, violent, vexatious despair is both

As a sufferer of manic-depression, Jamison’s speaks about the familiar. But do we hear? Family members hear who have seen the descent of a loved one into madness. It's like a hurricane that ravages the mind. Unless the hurricane hits close to home, it's just another news story. Courageous sufferers of mental illness, such as Jamison, educate and enlighten.

Mental illness needs to come out of the closet. As we engage in more conversations about it, we not only support creative people, such as Poe, but others as well. Those others might live next door.

Wrestling the Forbidden Within the Unconscious Mind

In his book, Metamorphoses, Ovid states in the beginning of Byblis’ tale that it “serves to illustrate a moral:/ that girls should not desire what’s forbidden;\” (p. 322).

However, the poet also seems to imply that Byblis represents a heroic figure, because she speaks her heart’s desire, albeit “forbidden.”

Human dignity exerts itself through her voice. Thus, her plight is a universal one in which an underdog refuses to censure self.

She courageously speaks and stands alone against conventions that condemn her passion through the narrator/poet’s voice, when he says, “she [does] not love her brother as a brother,/ or as a sister should” (p. 323). Byblis’ psychological struggle to reconcile two opposing systems—whether to voice her forbidden desire or to remain silent—is a study of wrestling the forbidden within the unconscious mind.

Byblis’ struggle begins when she “at first” does not “recognize her passion” (p. 323) and behaves affectionately towards her brother Caunus, kissing or throwing her arms around him often without thinking “it wrong” (p. 323). Since she does not “recognize” her passion, the phrase implies that she is unaware that she has erotic feelings toward him.

For “some time,” she is “deceived/ by the appearance of affectionate devotion” (p. 323). The word “deceived” suggests that she consciously identifies her love toward Caunus as “affectionate devotion” but unconsciously she is no more aware of her true feelings than a typical adolescent.

However, Ovid portrays the budding embers of Byblis’ metamorphosis from an unconscious to a conscious realization of erotic passion and from adolescence to young adult. Further, the poet foreshadows her actualization: “Her feelings for him gradually changed / and not for the better” (p. 323).

Byblis’ unconscious feelings first emerge to break through to her conscious mind “when she visit[s] her brother” on a particular occasion (p. 323). She “[is] elegantly dressed,/ and anxious that he [Caunus] find her beautiful” (p. 323). The word “anxious” connotes worry and nervousness. These feelings are natural responses for someone that is near a person of erotic interest, although not usually a sibling.

Her psychological struggle to fuse her unconscious with her conscious self begins “when [she is] relaxed in sleep,” and “an image of her passion [comes] to her” (p. 323). She can see the truth in her dreams—“an image of her lying with her brother,/ that made her, even sleeping, blush with shame” (p. 323). When she awakens, she not only remembers her dream but she also “[revisits] the dream of her desire” (p. 323).

Ovid’s rhetoric captures the distinct breakthrough of her unconscious into her conscious being—the moment she decides while awake to revisit her dream. Through the mental reenactment, she identifies her “forbidden” passion.

At this point, Byblis’ speaks for the first time about her battle to reconcile her two conflicting opinions about her “forbidden” desire for Caunus. In her monologue, she attempts to discern the meaning of “these visions that appear in the wordless night” (p. 323). Words are unnecessary when the dream-image speaks for itself. She intuitively knows the meaning.

Thus, to speak or not is her predicament. Courage is required to make the leap of disclosure and to bare the soul. Therefore, the heroine’s quandary is more poignant and challenging, because she must disclose her heart to her brother.

Although Byblis “overcomes her mind’s uncertainties” (p. 325), and questions, “What slope am I beginning to descend?” (p. 325), she descends, nevertheless, and is heroic, because she bravely counts the cost and with “[h]er shaking hands [sets] down the practiced words” (p. 325). She validates her self-identity and voices her “forbidden” desire in a letter to Caunus.

Her action to end her silence is also one to regain her sanity: “I did my best…to bring myself again to sanity” (p. 326). Her letter conveys her motivation that she “would not speak unless compelled by passion” (p. 327).

After Caunus reads her letter and rejects her love, Byblis’ emotional suffering is horrific. At this point in the reading, Ovid’s use of sympathetic imagination evokes empathy from the reader, and he or she is engaged in Byblis’ plight: “they say, she truly lost her mind,/…sets out after her self-exiled brother” (p. 330). The women of Bibasus see “Byblis raving all across the fields” (p. 330). Although she writes her letter with the goal to regain her sanity and speak her heart’s truth, she descends further into madness.

Byblis’ battle is similar to those that labor to articulate their hearts’ minds, albeit unpopular. She wrestles with her opposing opinions and decides to ethically pursue her desire. Although she is rejected, she faces the consequences of her unrequited love—a burden of grief.

Ovid’s veiled commentary is: to procreate/create art (whether the art is love or the art is writing or any other creative process), creators must count the cost. Unlike gods/Augustan rulers that contrive laws to benefit their unlawful acts, creators like Byblis/Ovid suffer to voice their creative impulses. Ovid’s rhetoric conveys the suffering so well that readers sympathize with Byblis’/Ovid’s plights. S/he are heroic figures for those who voice their heart’s truth in a dignified way.

Moreover, Byblis represents Ovid’s refusal as a writer to censure his rhetoric. As Byblis faced consequences for her “forbidden” speech—the alteration of her consciousness into a stream—Ovid faced punishment for his “forbidden” speech in his writings—the alteration of his existence in “a Fort Apache of the Roman frontier, where, according to Ovid, showers of poisoned arrows could come over the walls at any moment” (p. xi).

Thus, Ovid's moral in Byblis’ tale warns against the repercussions that result from desiring the “forbidden,” and her metamorphosis is a premonition of his ultimate fate.

Yet both Byblis’ and Ovid’s psychological battles to resolve their inner dilemmas—whether to follow their hearts’ desires by voicing them or to remain silent—are battles that most creative individuals recognize as part of the artistic process.

In Byblis case, her impulse to procreate with her brother overcomes her objections regarding consequences. In Ovid’s situation, his compulsion to create poetry or prose that examines politics and conventions are stronger than his concern for penalties.

Poignantly, Byblis transforms into a font “incapable of running dry” (p. 331), implying an everlasting existence. It serves well as an image of Ovid’s metamorphosis of consciousness into an everlasting stream of creative words that continue to flow today through his works and are “incapable of running dry.” Ovid’s stream of consciousness speaks today, and it refuses to be silenced.

A Poe Theory

In her book, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison discusses “artists and their voyages, moods as their ships of passage, and the ancient persistent belief that there exists such a thing as a ‘fine madness’”.

Jamison's book is a landmark study of manic-depressive illness and “its relationship to the artistic temperament and imagination.” The professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine discusses more than 175 writers (including Poe), composers, musicians, and artists. As the co-author of the standard medical text, Manic-Depressive Illness, which was chosen in 1990 as the most outstanding book in Biomedical Science by the Association of American Publishers, Jamison knows well the furies of manic-depression, as she discusses in her 1998 PBS interview:

I have a mood disorder. I think they're interesting. I think moods are intensely human. I think they are to some extent a great deal of what defines us as humans: our ability to experience them. I think our society gets very hung up on IQ and intelligence and intellectual functioning. I personally think the capacity to feel deeply is as great a gift—and sometimes burden—as the ability to think extremely well (PBS).

She argues that the scientific data is compelling “due to the extraordinary advances in genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology, much of modern psychiatric thought and clinical practice has moved away from the earlier influences of psychoanalysis and toward a more biological perspective."

Science writer, Mary Beckman, poses a question in her November 11, 2005, ScienceNOW story, titled “Driven to Create”: “Insanity and imagination often seem to go hand-in-hand, but is there really a link between the two?” In her article, Beckman reports the findings of a study by psychiatrist Terence Ketter of Stanford University and colleagues. They tested whether 40 bipolar adults and their children were more creative than 18 healthy controls and their kids.

The researchers found that the bipolar children scored higher on a creativity index than their peers who did not have the disorder. Beckman notes that the results indicate a “genetic connection between psychosis and creativity.”

Moreover, psychiatric geneticist Susan Smalley of the University of California, Los Angeles, commenting about the data says: “This is the first study to show that individuals genetically predisposed to bipolar disorder may also inherit greater creativity.”

E. A. Poe: A Study of Creativity and Bipolar

Although scientific studies in recent years connect creativity to bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness), the matter is not “settled” and controversies continue about the relationship between mood disorders and writers of prose and poetry. Edgar Allan Poe said:

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey vision they obtain glimpses of eternity....They penetrate however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the light affable (“Eleonora” in Bartleby).

My position explores “much that is glorious” and perceptive about the ways that the manic-depressive (bipolar), artistic temperament influenced Poe’s creative life and his rhetoric in “The Raven.” His unique stream of consciousness from the well of the manic-depressive temperament brings forth a depth of grief and euphoria that reflects the heightened states (depression and mania), inherent in bipolar sufferers.

Literature Review of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of Creativity and Manic-Depression

Physician Lombrosos wrote about the links between “genius and madness” in 1889. His ideas continued until Lewis Terman’s data in 1925 suggested that individuals of high ability demonstrated fewer incidences of mental illness than average.

While Terman was publishing his findings, Sigmund Freud analyzed creative people, because he believed that “the study of artists’ and writers’ lives would reveal basic psychological truths in persons of heightened sensibility and talent” (Neihart 47-50).

Since Freud, more diagnostic studies support the cognitive links between creativity and madness. One ambitious study was The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation by Marie Bonaparte in 1933. It was translated from French into English by John Rodker in 1949. Bonaparte contends that much of Poe’s writing reflects his psychological temperament.

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, co-author of the standard medical text, Manic-Depressive Illness, published her landmark study of manic-depressive illness and “its relationship to the artistic temperament and imagination” in her book, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament in 1993. Jamison discusses Poe and more than 175 writers, composers, musicians, and artists and argues that “the most creative” suffer “disproportionately from depression and manic depression.”

Jamison supports her arguments by analyzing primary sources of creative artists, allowing them to speak for themselves and by citing the “extraordinary advances in genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology” (Jamison PBS).

If scientific data supports the analysis that Poe suffered from a mood disorder, what new insights can be revealed in Poe’s literature? In addition to the intensity of emotional expressiveness that writers experience, who suffer manic-depression, Max Byrd in his 1974 book, Visits to Bedlam, Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century,” suggests, “…This modern melancholy is essentially an enhanced self-awareness, since the ego is the pivot round which the sphere of joy and grief revolves.”

This quote is from Raymond Klibansky and colleagues' book, Saturn and Melancholy. By interpreting some of Poe’s works that reflect an “enhanced self-awareness” about the universal “sphere of…grief”, my research attempts to emphasize the unique ways that Poe’s rhetoric engages the reader through passages of loss, such as abandonment, alienation, and grief.

Moreover, when analyzed through the lens of Freud’s observation that “melancholia sharpens the ambivalence of the love relationship as it disposes the mourner to self-punishment,” George Kennedy believes that Poe’s rhetoric has not been examined significantly for its psychoanalytic, literary interpretations and its benefits for human understanding. In his essay, “The Violence of Melancholy: Poe against Himself,” Kennedy contends that Poe’s fiction can be understood within the mind’s “twisted relations.”

Additional literature support Kennedy’s views: Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance by Kenneth Silverman; “Paul Bowles and Edgar Allan Poe: The Disintegration of the Personality” by Wayne Pounds; Midnight Dreary: the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe by John Evangelist Walsh; and “Poe and the Powers of the Mind” by Robert Schulman.

On counterpoint, Poe is trivialized by some experts. In F. O. Matthiessen’s famous classic, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, Poe is barely mentioned. Moreover, Wilt Napier argues in his essay, “Poe’s Attitude toward His Tales,” that Poe’s desperate financial straits stimulated him to “reduce to a formula” writing that would sell in popular magazines. Napier also criticizes those that “lean too heavily on the now fashionable ‘psychological’ method of biography” to analyze Poe’s literary work.

Poe writes about his struggle with manic-depression in his book Marginalia and in letters and notes that are included in Jamison’s book. She explains, “writers and artists themselves have been particularly forceful about the relief that their work can bring.” Her example is Anne Sexton, who said, "Poetry led me by the hand out of madness" (Jamison 122). By studying Poe’s writing through a multidisciplinary, theoretical approach, his rhetoric has the potential to lead people “by the hand out of madness” to process the pangs of unbearable suffering.